Still visible on the upper storeys of some houses around Ramsgate are substantial black cables running house to house and on occasion landing at a box high up on a wall with hard to read lettering: Rediffusion.  Not everyone will be familiar with the name or perhaps understand its history and why Ramsgate is such a key part of that. A few houses may still have a surviving selector switch inside… though redundant and gradually disappearing so let’s take a moment to ask – do you remember Rediffusion?

When wireless sets were expensive and access to the newly available radio transmissions was therefore restricted to those who could afford it, Joshua Powell, an advertising agent from Clacton-on-Sea, Essex and L.E. Owen, a local broadcast engineer developed an ingenious and yet simple answer. The concept was that by providing a good aerial in the centre of the town each house could use a linked loudspeaker to listen without needing a wireless set.

Broadcast Relay Service Ltd.  was incorporated in 1928 and started to relay radio programmes to subscribers in Clacton, Essex. The following year, 200 subscribers in Ramsgate, Braintree, and Hull were paying 3 shillings a week for the service. Ramsgate was one of the earliest towns to be granted a relay licence, in 1928 – the service at this time was radio only.  Quotes from a company celebration dinner in October 1945 demonstrate the technical advancement in this period:  “the impending conversion of Ramsgate to a three programme service would entail the use in cables of a material called ‘polythene’. which had played a large part in the wartime development of radar”.

The name Rediffusion wasn’t coined until 1931 when the fledgling idea had developed, its pricing model evolved and take-up accelerated.

During the war, Thanet, being part of “HelIfire Corner”, was on 24 hours a day alert and Rediffusion was called upon to assist the Civil Defence in every possible way. The service was installed in every Civil Defence post – for fire-watchers, police and wardens – and was left switched on permanently, so that any announcements made over the system about pending air raids etc. would be heard. In addition, the sound of the siren was superimposed on the service. The sound was picked-up by a microphone installed near a siren and fed at the control centre to a bank of relays which either superimposed the siren on the service or, after the service had closed for the night, switched the amplifiers on automatically and put the siren sound out on the network. A great help to all Civil Defence although it had one drawback. Often enemy aircraft were over the coast agitating well before the sirens sounded, with the result that the subscribers often had overnight rude awakenings when their speakers suddenly activated and blasted forth the sound of a screeching bomb, the dive of an aircraft or the roar of a gun, happening perhaps a few miles away.

The first experiments with wired vision were duly initiated in Thanet in 1950. The three Thanet towns were fed from a central receiving / amplifying station at Westwood. 83% of the total of 42,378 dwelIing-units were touched by wire and that yielded 24,817 Subscribers. At a weekly cost of a few pence homes could have the service and rent the receiving equipment from Rediffusion – the TV sets were stripped down with no tuner and the radios little more than a loudspeaker. Hard to explain to a modern audience accustomed to TVs with complex remote controls offering hundreds of channels and sometimes even voice activation!

Rediffusion abandoned this system of TV and radio distribution by the end of the 1980s. Much of the infrastructure has disappeared but, if you spot those tell-tale black cables around Ramsgate, don’t forget about Rediffusion!

If you’d like to read in more detail about the Thanet division of Rediffusion please check out this link

And if you or someone you know worked for Rediffusion, information on the Canterbury and associated South East Branches is being sought…  What are your memories? Do you have any old pictures, information on the wired system, staff, etc? Please email to mail@rediffusion.info

Sophie Clissold-Lesser

Vice Chair